
Were we an echo of an invented people who left in our wake as we fled from each other, belts of precious metals, pigment, spice, a perfect drop of water suspended in its singing. At the exit of the planetarium, a man with windy eyes spins a copper globe. A wall-gecko lashes its tongue across the blackness. I dream man as he was and always will be - rocks of white gold tumbling from his mouth - and awake, a sputtering coal in the grass, picking the arcto-boreal krill from another picnic's trash. In the forest of our quarrels lies the future buried, a museum still lit and selling tickets under the rubble of an exploded mountain our people once thought impenetrable. At port, a woman is unfurling her body beneath the spiraled dive of frigate birds. Her last breath - a watercolor, stolen by salt - the flutter of a star's ignition.